The Last Text
by Alibi Nonsense
Summary: Hunter is the enemy, but Yassen isn't quite as forgotten as he'd thought.
1. Text

Cocked gun trained, immobile, at sweating hostage. Browning pistol: sleek black barrel holding four bullets – two gone. No movement except rocking and roving eyes. No sound except faint whimpers from the bundle on the floor. No expression on Yassen Gregorovich's face.

He didn't care who died on his watch.

The hostage – some Iranian weapons-dealer who'd been selling stuff to both sides; Abbas Tirdad or something – had slowed to a stop in his panicked back-and-forth swaying and was now scrunched up into a tight little ball trying not to cry. Yassen knew the signs: he had seen it hundreds of times. They'd wrap themselves up as tight as they could, muttering meaningless platitudes under their breath; maybe they'd pray, if they were religious; maybe they'd sing quietly and let tears run down their faces (this was pathetic and honestly a bit revolting); maybe they'd laugh bitterly. If they didn't pull themselves together, they would go mad. Yassen had seen it hundreds of times before.

He sometimes shot them: it was kinder that way. Yassen was as kind as he could be in this job. Some people called him psychopathic.

He could hold a gun like this for days… three days, actually, although he preferred not to have to. At the end of that particular strait (an idiotic boast that he could last out a week, carried out within Scorpia's training zone), Hunter had smacked him for being so stupid, given him a cup full of water to drink and sent him off to bed with a couple of ration bars. He hadn't tried more recently: in the real world, it just wasn't a very good idea.

He tended to loose focus after about six hours. Sometimes he'd let his gun drift slightly off target, although it didn't really matter: he could realign it in an instant. Normally they had shifts to stop things like that happening, but they were short of staff today and Yassen was all they could dredge up. Well… not really 'dredge up', per se…

Hunter would've smacked him for that thought.

He was drifting again. Eight hours, he'd been here, with no breaks. They were going to relieve him in a bit, but _damn it_ it was difficult. He started to realign his gun once more then jumped, as a couple of bars of generic text-alert whistled from his pocket. The safety catch on the gun had been off and the bullet grazed Abbas Tirdad's ear, leaving a small crater in the wall behind him. Abbas Tirdad shrieked and started wailing quietly into his hands.

Yassen gritted his teeth and slipped the hand that wasn't holding a pistol into his left pocket. The phone looked Westernised, clean, and deceptively cheerful against the drab background of the cell, and Yassen opened the text in irritation, because Hunter knew he worked all hours of the day…

But Hunter wasn't here now. Hunter was the enemy. Hunter shouldn't care.

Yassen frowned (a mask: he felt like snarling). Hunter had this phone's number. Hunter was… absent… Nobody should be contacting him. Nobody.

He read the text.

_I hav a son – H_

Blinked. Slipped his phone back into his left pocket. Slowly lowered the Browning.

Smiled.


	2. The News

Two days ago, Yassen had been notified. Two days. It felt like a year.

He'd been standing aimlessly in a hotel room somewhere in Transylvania, doing some routine check-up that anybody could have done (except that 'anybody' didn't speak Romanian) and trying to pass the time until his scheduled appointment (he'd read hotel bibles so many damn times he knew Amos, Leviticus and Job practically off by heart), and in _this_ hotel room, somebody had stolen the television.

He'd tried playing Flappy Bird. He'd had to stop and count to ten to stop himself shooting the wall.

He'd tried sleeping. Jet lag meant he was wide awake.

He'd tried reading. '"I will send fire on the walls of Gaza that will consume her fortresses. I will destroy the king of Ashdod and the one who holds the sceptre in Ashkelon. I will turn my hand against Ekron till the last of the Philistines are dead," says the Sovereign Lord. This is what the Lord says: "For three sins of Tyre, even for four, I will not-"' He had shut the book.

Hotel rooms were meant to be minimalist. Yassen Gregorovich wished he could shoot whoever had invented the word 'minimalist' in the balls. And then stamp on their balls. And then kick them in the balls. And then burn them and spit on their ashes and send their eviscerated balls back in a box to their grandmother.

He'd swallowed his pride for long enough to play 'the floor is lava', but had given up when he'd realised grappling hooks would make very expensive, unnecessary holes in the wall… and that he'd have had to explain them to Scorpia's treasury department.

Abseiling was out. People would see him, and he was entirely certain the hotel staff didn't want their bed-sheets covered in gravel.

Taking a bath was also out. For one thing, the stupid little room only had a shower, and, if Yassen had a flaw, it was that he could never seem to take showers that lasted longer than 5 minutes, because he got bored of them.

So he'd resorted to cleaning his gun. Which was already clean.

And polishing his knife. Which was already polished.

And brushing his teeth. Which, considering he brushed them five times longer than most were advised to, weren't exactly 'minty fresh' so much as smelling like they could have started up their _own_ peppermint toothpaste factory on the spot.

He'd been lying on his bed, when his phone had started to vibrate, watching the ceiling. Marvelling at how all the tiny little dots on it made interesting little shapes like 'guns' and 'dead victims in pools of their own vomit' and 'receptionists'(sometimes they merged) and sometimes playing out little scenes in his head in which the man, who had invented minimalism, walked through the hotel room door and felt ten tons of sulphuric acid and the ceiling come crashing down on top of his head, and was buried in it till the ends of his days, burning in the agony of his own disintegrating flesh.

The incoming call had been a welcome surprise.

Yassen had sometimes gotten messages from Hunter. Hunter was loyal to that bastard organisation MI6, and, when he'd found out he'd… Well, he was glad he had kept the phone, at least: he wasn't fantastically rich like _some_ of the top dogs and couldn't afford a new untraceable, bullet-proof, hacker-proof, any-signal-anywhere, state-of-the-art, touch-screen phone (with Flappy Bird on it) every week like some of the higher ups could… but he'd been pretty angry at Hunter at the start of the whole fiasco and, at the start of it all, if he'd stood in a room with both his former mentor and the man who invented minimalism, and he'd had a choice which one of them to torture to the death, Mr Minimalism would have been (grudgingly) kicked out of the door with no questions asked.

Hunter knew this. He'd kept his distance for a while.

He'd gotten the first text message whilst guarding a hostage in Iran. Hunter had apparently been too pleased to stop himself. He'd replied a week or so later asking why (when he'd found the time) and Hunter had explained to him that he'd texted everyone individually on his phone, even the MI6 head, and that it wasn't anything personal. He'd received more after that, though. Barely, but it showed. He pretended he minded.

He didn't.

The third (the reply to the reply of the first counting as the second, in Yassen's opinion) had been a 'Happy Birthday' text, despite the fact Yassen had made a point of never telling Hunter his birth date. The date he'd received it on (and, indeed, all the birthday celebrations he'd received from the MI6 agent) had been the date he'd arrived at Scorpia – his 'second birthday', according to Hunter, because he'd clammed up about his first – and he'd grimaced and pretended it was a recent update in orders text and not a frivolous statement of congratulations text, because he'd been holding a gun up to someone's head and it had been embarrassing…or, as embarrassing as he'd allowed it to be when the only witness had been destined to become a corpse.

The fourth was 'Happy Easter'. The fifth was 'Escaped' (he could guess what it meant; Hunter knew he would). The sixth was 'Still not dead' two weeks after the first, and the seventh…

This was the seventh. The seventh was not a text.

Yassen breathed and tapped the screen. On the other end, there was a cough and a splutter and a half-choked rattling noise that sounded like a breath and then… _'Hello?'_

Yassen froze. His eyes focused on the phone like sharp-lensed crosshairs.

This man was not Hunter. _This_ man was _not Hunter_.

_'Hello?'_ wheezed the other man on the end of the line who had Hunter's phone. _'Hello?'_

Hunter was the only person who had Yassen's number. He didn't give it out. Scorpia had injected him with a tracking chip when he'd joined and, in any case, Scorpia didn't keep in touch with people; people kept in touch with them. Hunter had been the only person who'd known Yassen long enough to have earned his trust and thereby his phone number, which meant either somebody had the wrong number… or Hunter's phone had been stolen… or Hunter had given his phone to someone (unlikely)… or Hunter was… or Hunter was…

Yassen said, "Yes?" in a very clipped voice and tried to listen calmly to the bastard.

Stolen. He bet it was stolen.

The man on the other end sighed with a long deep breath that sounded like he wanted to fold his hands in his lap and sympathetically lean forward across a desk. _'This is Stryker&Son Funeral Services. Is this Mr… ah, Cossack? We are calling on behalf of a former friend.'_

Yassen felt his breath catch in a barely noticeable stutter. No wrong number. Yassen had used the code-name 'Cossack' to his mentor's 'Hunter'. Scorpia knew it. MI6 probably knew it (although he wasn't sure). Hunter knew it. If there was a fourth, it could be Helen Beckett – the woman he'd heard (through various sources) Hunter had married – but it wasn't something two people might bring up in a conversation, so he very much doubted she knew it either. Cossack was the contact name Hunter had used on his phone. This man had Hunter's phone. This man organised funerals… This man had Hunter's…

"Indeed," he said, managing to reign in his temper at least voice-wise. Yassen had practised this. At the most, he would sound mildly irritated. In his head, he felt mildly genocidal.

_'Ah…uhm…ahm...yes… well… delighted to meet you… ahm…ah… Mr Cossack… I'm sure… uhm… I am Mr Scask… I am a funeral director for Stryker&Son and…hahh…ahm…'_

Yassen knew. Yassen knew already. Yassen knew what he was going to say. Yassen wished he would get on with it. He had a tight lump congealing in the base of his stomach and he knew that that lump was dread. He didn't feel it often, but he knew what it meant and he wished the man would just get _on_ with it.

_'I am speaking on… on behalf of a… a Mr and Mrs…ah… John Rider?'_ He knew it. _'Ah…mm…who, ah, passed away on… erm… Sunday morning.'_ He knew it. _'I am…ah…erm… sorry for your…erm… loss…'_ He knew he wasn't.

Blank faced. Tight hands. Clenched teeth. Slow breaths.

Yassen's face would have looked perfectly calm and perfectly peaceful to an outsider. The perfect soldier. Some people who knew him could spot tells in some cases, like if he was very angry, his gun arm would tense up and, if he was very happy (when he didn't want people to know), he'd wince slightly in one eye. He was good at masking emotions. Very good.

If the people that knew him saw him now, all they would see would be a blank mask.

Yassen Gregorovich didn't laugh, Yassen Gregorovich didn't cry. Yassen Gregorovich was a tool of mass murder and he didn't need to do either of those two things to function at his absolute best. So he generally didn't.

He closed up.

If he wanted to laugh, he would stifle the urge. If he wanted to cry, he would do likewise. He would bring his tears to the grave and that was that. That would always be that.

_'The funeral is, ah… to be held… hmph… at, ah… Brompton, I believe… mm… Brompton Cemetery in London. On the… the 21__st__… of, of May… and… ah…ahm…at half… half past ten. Mm. Yes. I… I do hope… ahm… we see you there…' _*click*

There was a sudden silence on the other end of the line as Mr Scask hung up. The phone paused a couple of seconds, and then faded until the screen was partially grey and the pictures on it were indecipherable from any sort of distance. Yassen, face still totally blank, noted this absently out of the corner of his eye as he stared straight ahead at the wall.

If the lump in his stomach moved up to his throat, his face stayed as blank as alabaster.

He'd gone to the meeting later on. He'd almost missed it – it was only because he'd put a reminder on his phone that he'd remembered – and he'd come through the doors of the conference lounge, if not fashionably late, somewhere very close (despite the fact it stopped being fashionable when you were a contract killer at a political meeting).

He'd only spoken when he'd had to. He'd killed who they wanted him to. He'd gotten the next flight back to Russia and then a taxi to the new Scorpia campus (he'd shot the taxi driver). He'd checked in, gone up to the room they'd assigned him, gotten dressed for bed, slept, woken up…

It had been two days. It already felt like a year.

He didn't care whether he went or not, he told himself. Other people went to funerals: he just wanted to see what it was like, that was all. He was being normal.

He'd leave his gun behind, he told himself. He didn't need it to protect himself: he was a martial arts expert and weapons were everywhere. And besides… what kind of normal man brought a gun to a funeral? A coffin wouldn't kill him.

He'd wear a disguise, he told himself. There'd be MI6 agents there. There'd be people there who'd seen him on the wanted lists. There'd be guns there even if he never brought his own.

He'd gotten permission to leave in advance of his trip, since it was better that way and he had time to go through all the paperwork.

He was to leave on the 21st May on the 5.40 flight travelling to Gatwick and stay in a youth-hostel for a couple of days afterwards (cheap-skates, the lot of them) so that he could make the most of being off duty and see the sights that he'd only ever glimpsed before in passing. He'd eat ice-cream, no matter what the weather was like; no matter how overly sweet it was; no matter how much of it was artificially created chemicals. He'd _legally_ see Buckingham Palace, no matter how many times he'd illegally seen the inside of it on various jaunts. He'd visit Madam Tussaud's… Maybe they'd have him? No. Probably not. But he'd look anyway. He'd listen to Beethoven at the Albert Hall. He'd go to portrait galleries. He'd stea-… _look at_ all the old flintlock pistols and muskets in the V&A, and see if he could spot any inaccuracies in the Science Museums' human body exhibit.

He'd go on a red bus. He'd eat at the Ritz. He'd…

He'd bring roses.

They'd be white ones, of course. He always brought white ones because red was for lovers and yellow was for celebrations and pink was just _not_ something a self-respecting assassin could even _think_ about attempting to buy without being colour-blind.

So it was best, really. White was always best.

It couldn't really represent anything in literal terms anymore: naivety was long gone in the world of John and Helen Rider, and purity was dead in present day society… but Yassen, who knew better than anybody, knew that innocence was… innocence was…

He would have liked innocence.

A long, mellow, stilted voice told everyone over the intercom that the 5.40 to Gatwick was leaving in ten minutes and Yassen stood up, grabbing his bag from the seat to his right and striding off towards the terminal with soft, silent footsteps.

Innocence was childlike. Innocence was whole and beauteous and happy without added strings attached. White was innocence. White was purity. White was untainted and naive and fresh and clean and incorruptible and farewells and…

Despite all this, he didn't know if he wanted to go to London.


	3. Funeral

Yassen _hated_ public flying. Hated. All his sedatives were twelve-hour ones, his tablet and earphones were back in his room at Scorpia (and yet he'd packed sun-cream; how quaint), and the seat felt like somebody had been forced to remove all of the stuffing from some parts and relocate it to others.

Behind him, an American woman was nattering into her mobile about her trouble at work in an irritatingly nasal drawl; beside him a sticky two-year-old had just clambered into the seat and had stuck a fist with a jelly sweet in it into its mouth to suck; in front of him a Russian teenager was trying to clean someone else's tonsils with his tongue; across the aisle, a pre-teen was trying on a winning smile in his direction… He glanced at her. She twinkled. He eyed her sparkly hair-clips, the line of foundation that had stopped just below her chin, her very wonky, very thick mascara and eye shadow that gave her the appearance of a sleep-deprived attack-victim… He raised an eyebrow and looked cold. She pouted and turned. He sighed.

He hadn't even had the foresight to bring a novel. There were a couple of magazines in the netted pocket attached to the back of the Russian boy's seat (who was now groping his date in wild-abandonment and attempting the tongue-tango) and he plucked one gingerly out with his finger and thumb to take a look at.

_**Lips!**_proclaimed the cover: _**Hot Gossip! Hot Dates! Hot Scandal! Read Now!**_

He flicked through to the middle in dull resignation.

'_Dear Linda,'_ it read, _'My sister is married to the man I love and, several weeks ago, I had sex with him when we were at work. She recently found out and has cut off all contact. I don't know what to do! –Yours sadly, Unloved.'_

'Dear Unloved,' thought Yassen, 'Find a tall building and jump from it. You deserved everything that was coming to you, you little slut. -Linda.' And he rammed the magazine back into the depths of the netted pocket. The toddler beside him leant over and clumsily pulled a fistful of the gossip rag back over to wave about and coo at.

Yassen leant back in his seat. 3 hours, 45 minutes to go.

At 7.20am precisely, he woke up to find a morphed lump of jelly-sweet welded to his shirt and the toddler sucking on his credit card.

At 8.00am he'd _finally_ managed to scrape off the last little bit of sticky residue that had attached itself to his shirt, with aeroplane tap water, and had reclaimed his credit card.

At 8.23, he'd returned to his seat to find, to his eternal amusement, that the Russian boy in front had been slapped by his girlfriend hard enough to leave a handprint, and had been made to watch her make out just as enthusiastically with the toddler's reciprocating father over the back of her seat.

He'd had to force them apart to sit down.

At 8.29, he'd realised the toddler's nappy had burst open and was now leaking brown sludge onto its seat.

At 8.36 he'd been forced to wash _yet again_ because the brown gunk had found its way onto the toddler's hands, who'd grabbed him in an attempt to escape being changed.

At 8.57 he'd considered stabbing himself with a fork. At 8.58 he'd realised aeroplanes didn't supply metal forks.

At 9.02 he'd been coerced into holding the toddler on his _lap_ (money had changed hands) whilst its father and an aggravated air hostess attempted to undo the damage done to the seat. The toddler had ended up sitting on a coat.

At 9.22 he'd entered into conversation with the toddler's father, who, in actual fact, was a member of the metropolitan police who was coming back from holiday, and was an expert in weaponry. Yassen had given a false name and had pretended he was the curate of a military museum, and they'd had a heated discussion about various makes of gun throughout the ages, which Yassen, for the first time since the news of Hunter's death, found himself enjoying.

At 9.46 he'd remembered Hunter's death.

At 9.47 he'd relapsed into silence.

At 9.58 they'd landed and he'd exited the plane.

000

The taxi journey to the hotel was only marginally better than the taxi journey to the Scorpia base: for one thing, he'd just passed the stage of 'fixation' and moved into the 'able to think about other things without those things being related to Hunter' stage… for another, London taxis were infinitely more comfortable than taxis on the continent, mainly because they were used often enough that the drivers could afford nicer upholstery, but also because most Russian taxis were yellow, and therefore made him feel like a sitting duck. London taxis were black, very common (ie. harder to tail) and comfortable.

Unfortunately, the good was balanced out by the bad because he was indirectly going to a funeral in this taxi; on Russian roads, a person could find opportunities to drive over five miles an hour; he couldn't comfort himself with the thought of shooting the taxi driver, and the taxi driver kept trying to strike up a conversation, which was by far the worst thing about this whole situation.

"We're gunna turn lef' 'ere an' then take a seck'n right off onta the…"

Yassen ignored him.

"Cos thass faster 'n goin' onna M4, duncha fink? Funny 'ow all these people drive dahn there an' get stuck in a traffic jam, innit? Silly buggers. Always better on the smaller roads; thass what I always say. True, innit? Cos…"

Yassen continued to ignore him.

"An' my ol' ma said t' me; never drive dahn 'em big roads like 'em silly buggers what get stuck inna jam, cos yor regret it, right? An…"

Yassen contemplated the high-rise flats at the side of the road, and busied himself counting the windows.

"Anna turn righ' 'ere onta…"

And reading the graffiti.

"Don' mind 'em people what's lookin' at us funny. They's just wunnrin woss goin' on."

And…

"Ere… d'you speak English?" said the taxi driver, turning his head and nearly crashing into a streetlamp. Yassen felt his heart skip a couple of rather vital beats.

"Thatta no, then?"

The man continued driving. Yassen tried not to strangle him as he spoke. He didn't know if he wanted to continue with his life in this man's hands or not.

"Right. Jus' talkin' t' meself, then. As always," muttered the driver, and switched on BBC2, which was currently playing folk music. According to the assassin in the back, he had just saved his own life.

000

They pulled up at the cemetery at 10.22 in the morning. Yassen knew this because he had counted the seconds.

The driver grinned at him and made a couple of crude gestures to mean 'I help with bags' but his passenger glared at him, hoisted his (minimal) luggage onto his back and dropped a fistful of money onto the floor of the car with an added 'go away you lunatic' in Russian just to speed him on his way.

The man stared at him dimly for a moment, before shutting his mouth, getting coldly into his taxi, and driving off. Yassen, gritting his teeth frustration, allowed himself one minute of spewing out the most foul, torrid, evil-sounding Russian curses at the London public in general, and then calmly collected himself, pulled a black, baggy hooded jacket over his head, and drifted through the cemetery gates towards the crowd of graveside black. He would bring the roses tomorrow. They shouldn't see.


End file.
